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The plan had been for Laura to have gotten Cooper fed and bathed and ready for bed before Clint got home with the mysterious former-Colonel who wanted to talk to them both about a different ‘opportunity’ for Clint’s career. Of course, as with so many of their plans, this one ended up existing only in Laura’s head. Cooper--being his father’s son--had ideas of his own, ideas that he put into action as soon as Laura, juggling him and her laptop case and the two grocery bags, had set him down on the sofa. Before she could turn around, he’d squirmed down onto the floor and taken off in the speed crawl he’d perfected, laughing happily the whole time. Laura had only just managed to corral him again, halfway up the bookcase in the living room (the one that Clint had hastily bolted to the wall for this very reason) when the front door opened and Clint and the Colonel who was upending their lives were there.
“Honey, we’re home,” Clint called in that saccharine voice that he thought masked how much he liked saying the words. Laura rolled her eyes, like she was supposed to, but it was a thin gloss over how much she liked that he was happy to come home. Her family baggage might not be as heavy as Clint’s, but it was there and real, and she was fiercely proud that they were carving something good out of the wreckage their parents had left them with.
Cooper, energized by his daddy’s voice, promptly fought to get to him, wriggling so hard Laura nearly dropped him. She managed to juggle him over to the door and he launched himself out of her arms and into Clint’s.
“Not that there was ever any doubt,” Clint said, a note of pride in his voice as he took in the layer of scuzz that covered Cooper from head to toe, a combination of sand from the playground, apple juice from where he’d turned his sippy cup upside down and shaken it over his head, smashed peas from lunch, and Laura honestly wasn’t sure what else, “but that is definitely my kid.”
“No doubt about it,” Laura deadpanned. As Clint had Cooper upside down and shrieking with laughter (Laura just hoped things didn’t reach the point of throwing up, but she wouldn’t be surprised), she turned to the mysterious Colonel, saying, “Hello, I’m Laura. I’d apologize for the chaos, but I’m fairly certain it’s not over, so I’ll wait for a bit.”
“Nick Fury,” he answered, which was definitely interesting. Most of the military men she’d met were very attached to their rank, even the retired ones. He took the hand she held out and shook it with a politely firm grip. “No need to apologize. Thank you for letting me intrude on your family time.”
“Well, given your potential to completely upend my family’s life, tonight is probably the least of your intrusions.” Laura said it with a smile, but it definitely wasn’t the pretty, supportive speech that was expected from a military wife. Then again, the wives of Special Warfare Operators were a breed unto themselves and Laura had fit in far better than she ever imagined. It still didn’t mean she was particularly happy with what that life meant for Clint, but that was a different issue.
Clint didn’t even bother trying to camouflage his laugh, just leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “Told you she wasn’t just being polite when she said she wanted to meet you,” he said to Colonel Fury, and on that note, Laura excused herself to go get dinner out of the refrigerator.
Clint would eat anything that was put in front of him--more baggage from his childhood--and neither one of them were the best cooks, but if she put her mind to it, she could produce a few decent meals. She’d wavered between the automatic, reflexive hospitality that came from growing up in farm country and not knowing whether this meeting was worth going to any trouble for. In the end, she settled on cold fried chicken and potato salad. It was hearty enough that she wouldn’t worry if Clint was called out in the middle of the night, plus they could make it a few days before and not have to worry about timing.
While she assembled the platters and filled glasses with ice, she watched the goings on in the small living room. Clint had Cooper slung over one shoulder as he pointed out the bolts and brackets he’d put into the bookcase. Cooper was blissfully ‘flying’, with both arms out and his mouth pursed in a continuous, low buzzing drone. Nick Fury, the wildcard, the one that shouldn’t fit in with Laura’s family at all, stood easily for all that he didn’t smile, not really, and wore all black, with heavily tinted glasses that didn’t quite cover the scar curving down from under them. His clothes were civilian, but then again, none of Clint’s unit wore uniforms. He carried himself with the bearing that had grown so familiar to Laura since she had moved into Clint’s life, the one that identified him as Special Forces no matter what he wore.
He and Clint had a history that pre-dated Clint’s time in the military, one that Clint talked about only in the middle of the night, when it was dark and he didn’t have to see Laura’s face, the way he always did when he talked about the circus and the time he spent on his own. He’d promised Laura in the bright light of the morning that Fury had been one of the few good things during that time. Laura believed him, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want to see for herself. At the very least, she knew that Clint’s bar for ‘not-bad’ had been very low during those years, and she thought a second opinion was definitely worth everyone’s time and energy.
“Dinner,” Laura called and held out her arms to take Cooper. Being a smart kid, he knew what was coming and squirmed and fought with great determination, but he was filthy and there was no way the echo of her mother’s voice in Laura’s head was going to let him eat like that. He finally succumbed to the temptation of splashing water and making soap bubbles, and Laura’s perseverance got at least the topmost layer of dirt off his hands and face. She buckled him into his high chair, where he promptly smashed the bits of baked sweet potato that was his dinner and then rubbed them in his hair. Clint snorted, and Laura sighed, “Definitely your kid, Barton.”
“Don’t know why you even bother with the pre-dinner wash-up,” Clint observed.
“It’s less about the gunk and more about the germs he’s probably picked up,” Laura said tartly, and then laughed as Cooper shoved the next handful (and his whole fist) into his mouth. “Though I’m pretty sure he’s got your immune system, too, so I probably shouldn’t worry.”
It was all very relaxed and easy, but Laura never forgot that there was an unsmiling stranger there with them. She let the conversation between Colonel Fury and Clint wash over her, admitting to herself that everything seemed on the up-and-up, at least for someone who was coming at this new organization from the angle of having already spent years in Special Forces. The options Fury laid out seemed tailor-made for Clint, everything from a greater variety of mission objectives to pilot training, things that even Laura could tell were never going to happen in the more traditional Army. It all both pleased Laura and made her vaguely uneasy.
Cooper broke up the dinner table conversation by falling asleep in between bites, one chubby fist still clutching possessively at his “dessert” of mashed bananas.
“I got him,” Clint said. He gave Laura the look that meant she--and by extension, her project-planning brain--was on, and that he was good with whatever questions she wanted to ask while he was out of the room. She would have asked them with him there, too, but she was pretty sure he knew that. They had talked a lot about this potential switch, what it might mean to their life, how it could affect things going forward. It had been stressful to when she'd just been thinking about it all, but now that she had the chance to assess things for herself, she felt much more calm. She stood and started stacking the dirty dishes from around the table and then went to fetch a sponge to clean off the high chair before everything hardened to cement.
“Do you do this with every potential recruit?” she asked Fury. “Come to dinner and meet the family?”
“Not at all.” His voice was polite, but not distant. “I’ve had an eye on Clint from way back. When his name came up on the recruiting list, I thought it’d be good check back in on him again.”
“Good in an old-friends-catching-up kind of a way?” Laura kept her attention on clearing off the mess Cooper had left on the high chair. “Or good in a looking-for-disasters kind of way?”
“A little of both,” Fury admitted. “It’s a long way from where we met to here--” His nod encompassed Laura and the house and Cooper, too. “--and not an easy path. I'm happy to see for myself that he's here.”
“By the time I met Clint,” Laura said quietly, “he was far enough down that path that I have to really strain to see where it started.” She pushed her hair behind one ear. “But I can see the effort it’s taken, so I really have to ask you, Colonel, why exactly you want my husband so badly you’re willing to pay out for all of the retirement he’d be losing if he left the Army?”
Fury sat and watched her for a few seconds, and Laura wasn't under any illusions that he wasn't assessing her and her capacity for hearing whatever truth he had to tell. Clint wasn't the only person Fury was there to check on, that much was clear. Laura probably should have been insulted, but since she was in the middle of the same thing herself she decided she had no call to get upset.
“Well, I’d be lying if I didn’t mention his skill as a marksman, ma’am. I have seen him make shots that are damned impossible.” To Laura’s bemusement, Fury took the stack of dirty dishes from the table and carried them to the sink. “That’s not why I want him though,” he continued as he turned on the water and reached for the dish soap. “All that’s going to do is make my damn analysts lazy. I can hear them now--’We don’t need to plan that, just bring Hawkeye in.’”
“Why, then?” Laura asked.
Fury stood looking out her kitchen window into the deepening twilight. “There have been a few times in the last years that SHIELD has run ops with JSOC. My strike teams on the ground coordinating with Delta or Seal Team Six.” Laura finished the high chair and crossed the small kitchen to start some coffee. Clint could drink it around the clock and she had the feeling Fury was probably the same. “I’m sure I’m not telling you anything new, but things don’t always go according to plan.” Laura half-nodded. Clint could really never talk specifics, but Laura knew enough to understand that Spec Ops almost always had the missions where that was expected. Fury had watched her with a very somber smile. “They usually don’t, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the operations that worked the most smoothly were the ones with long-range support from your husband.”
Fury turned around and met Laura’s eyes, and she read a world of determination in them. “I need him because he can look at the situation as it’s playing out and know when not to take the shot. That’s a rare skill, ma’am, and one that’s a whole lot more valuable to me than how many times he can hit a bullseye.” He hesitated, and then shook his head as he added, “And I’ll be perfectly honest with you--it offends me as an officer and a commander the way his current command has been using him, like he’s nothing more than a goddamned delivery boy.”
Again, Laura couldn’t decide whether she was just being fed a line--and not just any line, but the one she most wanted to hear--but she didn’t suppose there was any way she was going to know if it was one way or another. She was saved from trying to figure out how to respond by Clint coming back in the kitchen, and the conversation turned back to more practical matters. The uneasy feeling persisted, though, and by the time Fury was saying his good-byes and Clint was walking him back out to his car, Laura was exhausted. She looked in on Cooper, watching him sprawled out and snoring in the toddler bed that, as small as it was, still dwarfed him, and then went to run a bath, as hot as she could get it.
She’d never been a bubble bath type of person--she spent half her days in the field, she needed industrial-strength showers a lot more than Calgon, take me away baths--but Clint had started buying her little bottles of the expensive stuff early on in their relationship, before they really even had acknowledged that they had a relationship. He’d been so transparently uncertain about any kind of gift that she’d hardly been about to voice her skepticism, and then, over the years, the concept had slowly wormed its way into her life. She still had an entire shelf of the little bottles, because she could never seem to keep up with what Clint bought for her, but there were far worse problems that she could have.
She was distracted, clearly not paying attention, and must have poured a good half of a bottle into the water if the giant mound of bubbles that confronted her when she shook herself out of her woolgathering was anything to go by. She shook off the ingrained guilt over ‘wasting’ things and batted enough of the bubbles out of the way to be able to slip into the water without inhaling soapy air.
By the time Clint tapped on the door, the hot water had done enough of its thing that Laura at least didn’t feel as though her back was going to involuntarily tie itself into a permanent knot.
“Hey,” Clint said, sliding in the door and closing it quickly to keep the warm air in. “Coop’s dead to the world. Thought you’d be halfway there, too.”
“My brain was going a thousand miles an hour,” Laura told him. “Letting it run itself out here seemed like a better idea than flailing around in bed.” Clint came and sat on the floor with his back braced against the tub, conveniently close enough that Laura could reach out and stroke her fingers through the short hair at the base of his skull.
“What do you think?” he asked, his voice low.
“I think,” Laura said, slowly, “it feels almost too good to be true.” Clint didn’t agree, but he didn’t disagree either. She added, “Do you trust him? Fury?”
“I…” Clint tipped his head back, “I trust him not to be fucking me over, but…”
“But you don’t trust him.”
“It’s not that,” Clint said. He was clearly searching for words, so Laura made herself wait patiently. It wasn’t anything she’d ever been good at, but she had possibly learned something from the disaster of her first marriage, and she was trying like hell not to repeat all her mistakes. To be fair, it was far easier to be a better partner to Clint than it had ever been the first time around and she got more back from her efforts than she’d ever dreamed possible. “It’s--There’s a difference between somebody who’s gonna get my squad killed because they’re too stupid or blind or caught up in politics to see what’s really going on and somebody who won’t hesitate to send me out on a no-hoper because that’s the only play they’ve got left.” He twisted his head so he could look at Laura. “Fury’s the second kind, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. People wind up dead either way.”
Laura breathed carefully, as she always did when they talked about the reality of Clint’s work, but before she could say anything else, Clint rushed on, “There’s another thing, one that we, you and me, I mean, we haven’t really talked about it yet.”
“Okay,” Laura said slowly. They had spent a fair number of nights talking it all out since Fury had first made contact with Clint; she wasn’t sure what they hadn’t at least touched on.
“It’s a couple things,” Clint said. “The money would be good--you know, not outrageous or anything, but better than now." Laura nodded--the pay scale for SHIELD was higher than the military, even with all the added stipends Clint qualified for. "And," he added, "we wouldn’t have to live on a base.”
He turned all the way toward her, facing her for real. “We could live anywhere, and I think we’d have enough to maybe get a little land.”
“Clint--”
“No, listen, okay? You dropped everything and just moved out here--”
“My choice,” Laura reminded him. “Mine, and one that I don’t regret for a second.”
“I know, and I’m really fucking glad you made it,” Clint said quietly. “I am. But I hate knowing that it’ll be until I retire before you get anything more than a couple of squares in a community garden.”
“Clinton Francis Barton,” Laura said, “do not tell me you think I’d rather have land than you.”
“No, but I think it’d be good if you had land and me. Some place that’d be just ours. A h--” Clint stopped himself before he said it, but Laura knew what he’d almost said and why. He half-smiled at her and shrugged. “Best of both worlds?”
Laura touched his face, the arch of his cheekbone, his temple, grounding herself until she could trust her voice. Neither one of them really had much experience with actual homes, but maybe they shouldn’t let that stop them from trying.
“I don’t have the background to judge this,” she finally said. “I’m trusting you to really know if it’s a better path, but having you--just you--is so far out in front of any other outcome that I don’t think they're even worth talking about.”
She leaned forward enough that she could rest her forehead against Clint’s for a few seconds and then leaned in a little bit more to kiss him. He reached up and cupped the back of her head, giving her just enough support that one kiss could stretch into two, and then four, and then so many that Laura stopped counting.